Over the years I have used the model to look at projects based on the
degree of uncertainty and complexity.

Complexity
includes project composition such as team size, geographic distribution
and team maturity.

Uncertainty includes both market and technical uncertainty.

The four quadrants are named with metaphorical animals

Let’s look at a collection of projects that comprised the overall release
of a complex engineering simulation application suite.

The Front End team, while globally distributed was nonetheless fairly
small and had well defined tasks necessary for the update from the legacy
simulator to cover the new functionality. With low uncertainty, generally
low complexity and a senior team leader, we let the team manage themselves.

The New Graphics was a new product and was looking to provide a solution
that no other commercial product currently solved. This meant that it had
high uncertainty. The team was relatively small, although globally
distributed. The senior developers were collocated in Houston with 2 remote
developers and a tester in Romania. The product manager was in Houston and
his proactive involvement was critical. To get the product started he
developed a user story board. The graphical description of the results he
was looking for worked very well to communicate with both the local and the
remote team. Of course the pictures were just an invitation to a further
conversation. The team relied heavily on the product manager and he made
sure to spend time with each of the senior developers typically daily and
often several times per day. The remote team was managed independently by
one of the senior developers and communicated as necessary via email and
phone conversations with a minimum of a weekly synch up meeting.

The 3D Visualization team was enhancing and maintaining an existing
application with a team of two developers and one primary tester. This
project had some overlap with the New Graphics project so we simply merged
the teams together in Scrum meetings.

The simulator team was by far the largest team but was all collocated
within Houston. The simulator is the core engine and must coordinate with
the other supporting applications. The product had been under development
and in the market for several years and the focus was on displacing legacy
applications. The gap was relatively well know so uncertainty was moderate
and the general complexity put it into the cow category. As a result we
settled on a longer iteration length of 3 weeks. The team started with daily
standups, and while they found value in the standups they felt that the
nature of their R&D work fit better with standups every other day. The team
adjusted and continued to deliver in a highly effective manner.

The overall system of systems required managing all of the uncertainty
and even more complexity. The total team size was such that we did not feel
the need for a Scrum of Scrums model. Instead, we had two ScrumMasters that
covered all of the projects, and essentially had them pair to cover the
overall release. Each ScrumMaster had primary accountability for a couple of
teams, and the other participated in key Scrum meetings for those projects
that they did not have direct responsibility. In that way both of them were
up on the overall program and knew what cross team issues needed to be
resolved. This model worked quite well as not only did the cross team
communications happen efficiently, but when one of the ScrumMasters was out
we had the other one help out without missing a beat.